As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option is an information handling system. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements can vary between different applications, information handling systems can also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information can be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems can include a variety of hardware and software components that can be configured to process, store, and communicate information and can include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
When implemented as a node within a network, an information handling system typically is assigned a unique network address from the address space of the network protocol implemented in the network. Nodes within the network typically use a host discovery technique, such as a conventional PING sweep, to discover other nodes, or hosts, within the network or subnetwork. While PING sweeps and other conventional host discovery techniques can be efficiently implemented in networks implementing a relatively small network address space, the evolution of network protocols and the growth in the number of networked information handling systems can lead to the implementation of a network address space that is too vast to make conventional host discovery techniques practicable. To illustrate, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) specifies network addresses of 32 bits that can only represent approximately 4.3 billion individual hosts, whereas the newer Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) specifies an 128-bit address space in part to permit far more hosts to be uniquely identified on a large network (such as the Internet). While a PING sweep of an IPv4 host assigned field of 8 or 16 bits can be performed in a matter of minutes or hours at present network performance capabilities, the typical IPv6 host address field of 96 bits or more would take millennia to completely sweep. Accordingly, an improved technique for host discovery in a network utilizing a relatively large network address space would be advantageous.
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